WASHINGTON  It was a signature plan of Bill Clinton's presidency: Attack the rising crime rates of the early 1990s by putting 100,000 more cops on America's streets.

Officer Steve Glenn of the Sacramento East Area Problem Oriented Policing Team searches a man outside of an apartment.

By Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

Ten years later, the grant program known as COPS (for Community Oriented Policing Services) has given $10 billion to help more than 12,000 police agencies hire and reassign officers. Politicians and police chiefs across the nation have said that COPS is a big reason for the sharp decline in crime rates that began in the late 1990s.

But now, with the largest buildup of local law enforcement in U.S. history winding down, a less flattering view of the COPS program is emerging: Federal audits of just 3% of all COPS grants have alleged that $277 million was misspent. Tens of thousands of jobs funded by the grants were never filled, or weren't filled for long, auditors found. And there's little evidence that COPS was a big factor in reducing crime.

The audits, conducted by the Justice Department's inspector general and reviewed by USA TODAY, allege that some police agencies wrongly used the hiring grants to cover routine expenses at a time when local budgets were tightening.

In Albuquerque, for example, auditors allege that police used $7.4 million of the city's $12 million in COPS grants not to hire officers but to offset city cuts in the police budget. Albuquerque police deny any wrongdoing. (Related story: Auditors fault city)

In Novinger, Mo., former police chief Charles Middleton was sentenced to two years' probation and ordered to pay $53,000 in restitution in 2002, after auditors accused him of using grant money to pay his salary and give himself a $6,000 raise.

The Justice Department, which oversees COPS, has recouped only $6 million of the $277 million in grant spending that auditors have questioned. Auditors continue to seek documentation from 82 police agencies that have not explained in detail how they spent $111 million.

Top recipients

A look at the top recipients for COPS grants, 1994-2004

Department

Total grants (in millions)

Hiring target

Total officers 1994

Total officers 2004

New York City

$422.4

4,808

36,693

36,372

Los Angeles

$260.1

2,395

7,856

9,097

Chicago

$91.2

946

13,063

13,635

Philadelphia

$56.5

753

NA **

6,706

Phoenix

$55.4

735

2,041

2,821

Sacramento County

$41.6

243

1,137

1,614

San Juan

$39.1

813

450

1,100

Baltimore

$38.6

406

3,099

3,323

Illinois State

$37.5

501

1,926

2,030

Sacramento City

$35.8

255

540

707

* — Received waivers from COPS hiring requirements because of budget crisis after Sept. 11. ** — No data provided

Acting Assistant Attorney General Tracy Henke, who oversees the COPS program, says most police departments that got grants spent them effectively. She says the Bush administration is shutting down COPS to cut costs, and because the program has "met its objective." But she acknowledges that when it came to tracking the money, "it's possible that all the necessary controls weren't there."

Officially, the Justice Department says the COPS program "funded" 118,000 new police positions across the USA. But a review of Justice programs last year by the White House Office of Management and Budget said that COPS had put "fewer than 90,000" officers on the street. A University of Pennsylvania study in 2002 found that the number probably would wind up closer to 82,000 — or 30% fewer cops than Justice's estimate.

Meanwhile, few crime analysts say that COPS grants were significant in reducing crime. Analysts such as Stanford University's Joseph McNamara say that a much bigger factor has been the strong economy, which has kept many young people employed and away from crime.

Of three studies on the issue, only one — which was funded by the Justice Department — found that the police hiring program was chiefly responsible for drops in violent crime rates among big cities. The General Accounting Office, Congress' research arm, dismissed that study as "inconclusive."

The link between COPS grants and lower crime rates has been further obscured by the experience of cities such as Oklahoma City, which did not participate in the police hiring program — and yet saw crime rates drop by as much as those in cities that got grants. (Related story: Okla. City's experience)

Henke says COPS was "a piece of the puzzle" in cutting crime. "Did it contribute? Yes," she says. "At what level? That cannot be identified."

Boosting community policing

The COPS program was designed to help bring about fundamental changes in policing by drawing officers closer to the citizens they protect. And in scores of communities across the nation, it did.

Joseph Ryan, chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at Pace University in New York City, says that COPS "changed the way police do business" by giving many police chiefs the additional staff to implement an anti-crime strategy known as "community policing."

The idea of community policing is to get away from the traditional "call-and-response" model, in which officers run from one emergency call to the next. It involves sending officers into neighborhoods to build relationships with residents, identify the sources of crime problems and solve them before they get worse.

Police in Huntsville, Ala., used COPS money to put 10 new officers in local schools, a move that Chief Rex Reynolds says helped to curb juvenile crime.

In Illinois, State Police Director Larry Trent says COPS gave him extra officers to boost patrols of dangerous roadways, which he says dramatically cut the number of fatal crashes in the state.

And in Sacramento, the combined $77 million that the city and county received in COPS grants helped to put nearly 500 new officers on the street. George Anderson, chief deputy of the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department, says that although the grants' precise role in reducing crime "is difficult to assess," the additional cops made residents feel safer in several troubled communities. (Story: COPS has cleaned up Sacramento streets)

Nationally, COPS grants provided up to $25,000 a year for three years to help pay the salary of each new officer. Other grants provided money for departments to hire civilians or to buy computers and other technology so that desk officers could be put on the street.

For departments that accepted the grants, there was a catch: They had to agree to pick up the tab to keep the additional officers for at least a year after the grants ran out.

"A big part of our decision (not to participate) was that we knew some portion of the (federal) funding was gonna go away," Oklahoma City Police Chief William Citty says. "We just couldn't guarantee that we could pick up those costs." (Story: Oklahoma City thriving without COPS)

New York City police got the most money from COPS — $422.4 million to hire and redeploy 4,808 officers. Still, the department shrunk by 321 officers, to 36,372, from 1994 to 2004. The drop came amid sharp budget cuts after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, which killed 23 officers.

The grants "gave us the resources to mount some of these programs — gang units, cops in schools, things like that," says Michael Farrell, New York's deputy police commissioner. With the grants drying up, the department is shifting resources to try to keep those programs alive. "We're convinced ... that we need to continue doing these things."

Questions about spending

The audits by Justice's inspector general involved only about 370 of the 12,000 law enforcement agencies that received COPS grants. Some were audited because they were suspected of misusing the money; others were chosen randomly. But the findings from that sampling — $277 million in questionable spending — suggest that many grants were misused.

Auditors found $13 million in questionable or undocumented spending in Atlanta; $7.5 million in Albuquerque; $7.4 million in El Paso; $7.1 million in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and $6 million in Washington, D.C. The money sent to those cities — more than $107 million — was supposed to put 1,432 officers on the streets. But because audits of those police departments are unresolved, Justice's Henke acknowledges that it's unclear whether the grants came close to doing that.

Some of the most blatant abuses alleged in the audits occurred on Indian reservations. On the tiny Picuris Pueblo in New Mexico, for example, the two-person tribal police department was awarded $728,125 from 1995 to 2000 to hire eight additional officers.

But the pueblo hasn't documented whether the officers were hired, and it closed the police department in 2002 amid financial problems, auditors found. It's unclear what happened to the grant money, or whether anyone was hired.

"All of our federal grants are in disarray and our relationships with various federal agencies are in jeopardy," former tribal governor Gerald Nailor said in a written response to the audit.

Grant money gold rush

Craig Uchida recalls the frenzy when the COPS grant office opened for business in October 1994.

Thousands of applications poured in, says Uchida, then the assistant grant director for COPS. There were fewer than two-dozen staffers to review hundreds of millions of dollars in grant requests, he says, and they barely had time to determine whether applicants were legitimate police agencies.

"The (Clinton) administration wanted to make a splash," says Uchida, now a law enforcement consultant. He says there was pressure to get as much money "out the door" as quickly as possible.

The program was designed to minimize administrative costs, and Congress never gave it enough money for a big staff of grant reviewers, auditors and managers. On the other end of the pipeline, millions of dollars from COPS went to police departments that often had little experience with big federal grants. Some didn't have computers to track spending.

The COPS program's limited staffing often has meant limited oversight of grant recipients. And when the inspector general has found that funds were misspent, the COPS office — the only agency authorized to seek reimbursement — rarely has sought payback.

COPS spokesman Gilbert Moore says the office focuses on getting police agencies to meet their hiring obligations under the grants, rather than on seeking reimbursements.

That strategy has led to a curious situation in the case involving the Picuris Pueblo. Despite the pueblo's acknowledged failure to account for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the COPS office has not demanded reimbursement. Instead, the office has requested "additional information" — from a police department that no longer exists.

'Funded' jobs weren't filled

Puerto Rico's San Juan Police Department seemed to win big under COPS. Starting in 1994, when the force had about 450 people, it got $39 million to hire 813 officers.

But an audit by Justice's inspector general in November 2003 found that San Juan had fallen hundreds of officers short of its hiring commitments under the grants. The audit questioned $7.1 million in grant spending, and suggested that San Juan used much of it to pay expenses that should have been covered by the local police budget.

The audit's allegations remain unresolved. With urging from the COPS office, San Juan has hired scores of officers in the past 18 months. The police department also has hired accountants to document its use of COPS funds.

"Everything is in order," says San Juan Police Commissioner Adalberto Mercado. "But we haven't sent in all the papers."

Meanwhile, the COPS office at Justice still counts all 813 officers that were supposed to have been hired in San Juan toward its tally of 118,000 police it says were put on the street by the grant program.

The San Juan case reflects the calculus the Justice Department has used to claim that COPS is responsible for 118,000 new officers. The grants have indeed "funded" that many jobs, but scores of agencies failed to hire all the officers they were supposed to. According to federal audits and police staffing data obtained by USA TODAY from the 20 largest recipients of COPS grants, thousands of hires funded by COPS never materialized.

In their study of the COPS program three years ago, University of Pennsylvania criminologists Jeffrey Roth and Christopher Koper said that while some departments misused COPS money, many others that hired officers with funds from the program couldn't afford to keep them once the grants expired.

COPS has been "like an open house, with all these officers coming and going at different times," Koper says. "There's no one time at which all 100,000 are there."

Henke doesn't dispute the notion that COPS fell short of putting 118,000 officers on the street. But, she says, most agencies "have been able to maintain or sustain those officers" funded by the grants.

Officials tout impact on crime

During the past decade, the COPS program has been a common explanation for the decline in crime that began in the mid-1990s. Former president Clinton has touted it. So has his attorney general, Janet Reno, along with scores of current and former police executives.

Robert Olson, a former police chief in Minneapolis, is among them. He's sure that the 81 cops Minneapolis hired with $6 million in COPS grants during the mid-1990s helped cut local crime rates to levels the city had not seen in three decades. Olson cites what happened after budget cuts wiped out 140 police jobs in 2003: Robberies jumped 20% as cops were pulled out of neighborhoods to cover emergency calls.

But other cities did just as well in fighting crime during the 1990s without COPS grants. Oklahoma City did so by using community-policing concepts in troubled areas without hiring many new cops.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has called COPS too costly, says the program often gets too much credit for today's low crime rates. "Observing that crime rates dropped when COPS grants flowed to a community is not conclusive evidence that the grants helped to decrease crime," says David Muhlhausen, a crime analyst for Heritage.

Pennsylvania's Roth and Koper say the lack of more definitive research on the COPS program's impact on crime may have as much to do with politics as anything else. They say the Justice Department has not sought a thorough assessment of COPS because the results could bring bad publicity to the popular grant program.

Henke says the program has done the "best it could" to monitor its operations and track its impact.

But Roth and Koper say they asked Justice three times for funding to do more research on COPS' impact on crime, and were rejected. "Neither administration (Clinton's nor George W. Bush's) has ever shown the slightest interest" in such research, Roth says.